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New Horizon For Nanotech

Posted by Hemos on from the everyday-things-are-getting-smaller dept.

UserID 3.14 writes "It looks like faster chip-building tehnology is coming, and it may usher in the next wave of MEMS and nanotechnology with it. This article from Science Daily talks about a new electron-beam photolithography machine at JPL that rasterizes 10 times faster than the previous standard with a beam imprint that's half the size. Chip prototyping will go faster and the researchers there will be able to deal with features that are molecule-sized. Best of all, if you want to use the machine, they give a contact for further info."

2 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. Cool! by atrowe · · Score: 5
    The article doesn't mention cost, but I would assume that this technology would be signifigantly cheaper than the billions of dollars it currently takes to open a semiconducter fab. This decreased cost will make it possible for the technology to create cheap, powerful processors available to the masses.

    This would also make it possible for the open-source movement to expand into hardware as well as software. Imagine renting time at the local fab to sample a processor that was designed entirely by the community. If this technology pans out, we could eventually adapt all the advantages of today's open-source software into low cost open-source hardware. I can't wait to see what advances in microprocessor technology will evolve once the open-source community sets it's mind to developing a free(as in speech) processor. Yay!

    --

    -atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.

  2. MEMS based storage by sllort · · Score: 4

    While we're dropping cool terms in the story header, let's pretend for a moment that no one knows what MEMS based storage is, and give them the link to the MEMS Research Unit at CMU, where they are prototyping and developing this stuff right now.

    The short story is that it's a very small sled containing magnetic data (on a substrate) that is pushed by very small actuators of an assembly over read/write heads. It fits on the price/speed/storage curve somewhere in between hard drives and Flash. If you want to know more from people who actually know what they're talking about, read the intro and then click on their research papers.

    I sure wish you could buy the stuff, but it's still a few years from primetime.